this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Different font? This is literally a picture of the original.
yeah, and as you can very obviously see it does not look like modern text, the average person would struggle to identify most letters.
My point is that using a text written in what is effectively a completely different writing system isn't a fair comparison, of course it's going to be impossible to understand when you can't tell what the letters are! That doesn't tell you anything about how different the actual language is.
Because it's not; that was the point. It's still English, but is unrecognizable as such. It literally looks like "some kind of elvish."
I never really understood at what point a language evolves enough to be an entirely new language.
Old English feels so far removed from even middle English, let alone modern English.
We have "new" and "old" to differentiate them, but with how many Latin words alone entered English between Old English and Modern English, It's something I've never found a comprehensive answer to.
I guess, what is it about proto-indo European that we acknowledge as a distinct language from the hundreds of thousands of languages that evolved from it, other than time scale and global impact.